A comprehensive look at the history of the United States through the prism of working people. In this fully updated new edition, the authors have added a wealth of fresh analysis of labor's role in American life, and three entirely new chapters on global labor developments, worker activism in immigrant communities, and the 2016 election and unions' relationships to Trump. -- Adapted from back cover.

An epic account of how working class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s, this work is a wide ranging cultural and political history that presents the decade in a whole new light. The author's work, part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film, and TV lore, makes new sense of the 1970s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from the optimism of New Deal America...

"Who is the American working class? Do they still have a fair shot at the American Dream? What do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life? While writing this book, Batya Ungar-Sargon visited states across the nation to speak with members of the American working-class fighting tooth and nail to survive. In Second Class, working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories—cleaning...

"In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for 'Oriental goods' took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey's beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the...